Now that I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a little over a month, I have some additional observations on its merits and demerits. Overall, I’m still extremely happy with the product and consider it to be the best laptop I’ve owned to-date.

I still do quite a bit of work in Windows (both development and work with MS Office). I purchased a copy of VMWare Fusion to virtualize my Windows Bootcamp partition. Fusion makes it easy to operate concurrently on both Windows and OSX without any noticeable performance hit. I can drag files or copy and paste text back and forth from one environment to the other. Unlike Parallels, it provides a performant virtualized environment that I would actually do development in. That said, I have noticed some strangeness when trying to access a DVD drive or USB devices while running Fusion. I haven’t investigated enough to figure out what the issue is, but these problems seemed to disappear after shutting down the virtualized environment.

Another thing about the MacBook that is quite nice is the little remote that it comes with. It works well for driving presentations, pausing movies and shuffling songs. I’ve previously owned a USB-enabled remote for presentations, which I’ve now happily passed on to my wife.

Speaking of movies, I’ve been quite impressed with the quality of the MacBook Superdrive. I have a few DVD movies that I picked up in China that I haven’t been able to play on a PC. But the Superdrive can read them.

My one big annoyance is the lack of support for a direct VGA connection. I hate having to carry around the DVI-VGA dongle. It’s easy to forget or leave behind attached to the projector. I understand why Apple would provide support for the higher-quality, more future-proof DVI, but the majority of projectors and external monitors out there still require a VGA connection. Would providing VGA support really been such a big effort?

I’ve had my MacBook Pro now for just over a week and I have to say that I’m very impressed so far. It performs well, it’s well designed, it has great battery life and it is light and portable. I have to admit that I was a bit worried about adapting to OSX, but the learning curve was gentle and most things were quite intuitive. Now that I have a WindowsXP Bootcamp partition set up, it makes for a great .NET development laptop as well. One of my colleagues mentioned that you can use OSX disk utility to create an additional FAT32 partition that you can use to share common files between Windows and OSX. If I had thought of that then I could have set the Bootcamp partition up as NTFS. Anyway, all of that aside, there are still some things about the Mac that bug me:

1. Why does Apple still insist on designing mice and trackpads with only one button? I know it’s a design thing, but honestly. Having to do crtl-click or have two fingers on the trackpad + click just seems to be poor usability.
2. Once you minimize a window, it is very hard to find again. The only way that I’ve found it is to go to the Window menu and select the window’s title. Minimized windows don’t show up when you cmd+`. This seems to be a usability flaw to me, especially as in MS Windows minimized windows are easily visible in the task bar. Also as a Windows user, I’m accustomed to double-clicking on a window’s title bar to maximize it — in OSX, the window is minimized instead.
3. In OSX, closing windows does not close the application. It is pretty easy to end up in a situation where you have a lot of applications running without realizing it because there are no open windows associated with that application. Coming from a Windows background, it seems pretty intuitive that closing the last open window would close the application, but apparently the designers of OSX don’t think so.
4. The keyboard layout seems a bit bizarre to me. For example, why not have a separate delete and backspace key. If I want to do a Windows-style delete, I have to type fn+delete. This is a pretty common operation — why not dedicate a key to it instead of making it a combination key click. They could use the superfluous enter key which, at least on the MacBook Pros, is on the bottom right side of the keyboard. And while we’re at it, why not dedicated page up, page down, home and end keys instead of having to do ctrl+arrow key or cmd+arrow key.